


A Resting Place

by coulson_is_an_avenger



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Horror, The Buried (TMA), The Eye (TMA), The Magnus Institute (The Magnus Archives), content warnings in the beginning notes! please be safe!, yes this is an avatarsona fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:26:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24533020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coulson_is_an_avenger/pseuds/coulson_is_an_avenger
Summary: "So now you want my story. In some ways, it is a very short explanation. The truth is often simple when you break it down to what it looks like when scrawled across the heart in earth-blackened fingers dripping mud. Our motivations are not so complex when stripped of the guilt and pride and individuality we hide behind. The complexities of our nature we cling to so severely are all pointless, so proud and so brash when faced with instinct. I only wanted to rest. That’s it, the whole of the truth. I just wanted it to be over. All I did, and all I will do, is because I was scared, and not myself, although I’m not sure I know who that is anymore. The line between where the old Leah ends and where their freedom begins is blurred. Perhaps I am still the same as I always have been. Or perhaps I am now something so different that I am only recognizable by a shared name."Statement of Leah Amfora Morass, regarding their removal from the Magnus Institute, and a sinkhole they discovered in the park.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	A Resting Place

**Author's Note:**

> After nearly two weeks of work and annoying nearly everyone I know about it, I've finally finished the statement for my avatarsona!! [You can find some art here for them if you'd like!](https://mossy-rainfrog.tumblr.com/post/619513416562900993/im-still-working-on-my-more-detailed-projects-for)
> 
> I hope you all enjoy this, it's got way too much of me in it, and honestly freaks me out, but it was so much fun to write. That being said! There's some content warnings to watch out for:
> 
> **Scopophobia, slowly worsening mental state, reported physical violence, eye trauma, reported character death, potentially claustrophobia-inducing descriptions, brief mention of vomit, and canon-typical romanticization of horrible eldritch monsters.**  
>    
> Please take care of yourselves and enjoy! I love you all!!<3

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Leah Amfora Morass, regarding their removal from the Magnus Institute, and a sinkhole they discovered in the park. Statement recorded direct from subject, 24th May, 2017. Statement begins.

**LEAH**

You have _no right_ to demand this of me, you know. You and your Institute, you’ve taken _everything_ from me, and now you want my _story?_ How could I possibly feed you more than I have already? What more can you want to know that you haven’t already seen? I know I’m not going to get a choice in this, you just can’t help it, can you?. I know what you do to compel people to talk. I know what you’ve already done to me, so after I leave this place today, you had better understand that it is a _mercy_ that a part of me still feels sorry enough to spare it from being swallowed up by the very earth it stands so proudly upon. You will not be granted that courtesy a second time. Remember that.

**LEAH (STATEMENT)**

...Now, before I begin, you have to know that I didn’t mean it. As muddled as everything has become now, as much as I’m no longer sure of what I once knew, I can still tell you that for certain. All the pain, all the suffering. I know now that I didn’t have a choice; that the fear was going to have me one way or another, and I’m one of the lucky ones, in a sense, to have gotten to choose that much, but I still didn’t mean for it to happen like this. I feast on what I have done, but I think a part of me is sorry, so I’m refraining from crushing your lungs, but that is beside my point. I am so tired, you see, and you can only spend so long running from something before you either give in, or it catches you, or you become something worse than what you fear. And for the record, I do not want your help. Not you who looks and sees everything. I’ve had enough of your prying eyes, your gaze that watches all. No, you will not help me. But I have found something that can, and even now it comforts me in the grasp of your stare.

So now you want my story. I suppose that’s fair, it’s what you do. How could I blame you for your nature? I’ve never been very good at stories. All the bits tend to mix together, to wrap themselves up in the feeling rather than the chronology, and sometimes I can’t be sure if I’ve even told the truth or not. I hope I have. I hope I will. I owe the others that, at least, after everything. In some ways, it is a very short explanation. The truth is often simple when you break it down to what it looks like when scrawled across the heart in earth-blackened fingers dripping mud. Our motivations are not so complex when stripped of the guilt and pride and individuality we hide behind. The complexities of our nature we cling to so severely are all pointless, so proud and so brash when faced with instinct. I only wanted to rest. That’s it, the whole of the truth. I just wanted it to be over. All I did, and all I will do, is because I was scared, and not myself, although I’m not sure I know who that is anymore. The line between where the old Leah ends and where their freedom begins is blurred. Perhaps I am still the same as I always have been. Or perhaps I am now something so different that I am only recognizable by a shared name.

So where do you want me to begin? The memorable day of my childhood when I first truly realized that I would be spending the rest of my life chasing a perfection that I would never attain? Running from an expectation I could never hope to live up to? The first time I truly knew how it felt to be exhausted from a fate that had not yet occurred? All the classes, the jobs, the promises of careers, the pathways, the achievements; all the graves for the hundreds of people I was supposed to become. The ghosts of those alternate selves following me every waking moment of the day, clinging to my sides like a shadow. A thousand reminders of who and what I was supposed to be, a thousand futures I had erased of myself, a thousand graves I had dug while failing or refusing to live up to each of them. Or should I begin later still, with the monsters your kind sent to devour me? What moment should I begin with, to truly convey that every waking moment of my life I can remember has been a pursuit or a flight? How do I truly relay the exhaustion that comes with knowing that no matter how much I grow, no matter how far I go, it will not be enough to allow me to finally rest? Perhaps I should start at the clearest beginning: when I came here, when I sold myself to your Institute like a blind sheep, when I chose the place that later decided it would consume me alive.

I’d like to tell you that the paranormal had been my lifelong passion, that it had always been my dream to work somewhere like here, but the truth is that I really just needed a job. There wasn’t much opportunity to work in my field with what schooling I had, and I couldn’t afford to go back to university without a source of income, so I kept my eyes open, and it turned out this place was willing to give people with my meager qualifications a chance. It looked interesting enough so I took a starter position as a researcher and thought that was the end of it. I planned to stay here just until I’d saved up enough money to get my Master’s, and then I’d move on to another research job in a more… scientifically respectable field. At the time I thought it was the best opportunity I could possibly get in my situation, and looking back on it, now that I know what really goes on here, I’m still not sure I disagree. I needed the pay to keep me out of tremendous debt, and well, after everything I’m still alive, so maybe it was. My colleagues though… it would have been much better for them if I had steered far clear.

The job itself wasn’t all that remarkable, really. I’d been studying research at uni already, and while the Institute followed some different protocols than I’d learned at school, I just assumed that every place of research did things a little differently, which I didn’t have a problem with. The most interesting part of the job was when we dealt directly with statements from the Head Archivist: a task that mainly consisted of pinpointing some key names and locations to follow up with, sending out one or two researchers to confirm the locations or people, and then maybe throwing in some interviews to get additional confirmation if we could find anyone who wanted to talk. But, most of the time was just paperwork. I wrote a lot of very limited methods and a lot of very long analyses and spent almost all of my time behind a desk trying not to fall asleep. I was good at paperwork, but by no means do I enjoy it, and once it became clear that that was about all I’d be doing unless I got promoted to the archives, I was honestly a little bummed out. The other researchers were fine, at least. Most of them I never really talked to, but I got on pretty well with a couple others my age. Julie was in a similar situation as me, and she was friendly, and would be starting back up at school in the fall, so we’d chat about that and how her girlfriend was doing and what she hoped to eventually do with her career. Nick I had less in common with, but he was funny, so we ended up hanging out more than I would have expected. He had a sister about my age, I think, and apparently I reminded him of her in some ways, so he sort of took me under his wing. I’d like to think that all of us were pretty good friends after a while. Outside of work, things started improving for me. My financial situation had never been drastic, but it definitely improved after I got the job. I was able to get a nice flat to myself, rather than living with family, and started saving what I could for my next degree. The new place was a bit small, nothing special, but it was near a park, and I found it charming, so I liked it. For a while things were going really well, actually, what with my newfound friends and flat and relatively low-stress job. I started thinking I didn’t really mind the situation at all. I worked there for about three months before I found it.

The sinkhole was at the edge of the park near my flat, beneath a particularly thick patch of trees, and it was hungry. Have you ever fallen into a sinkhole? When I was twelve, I stepped into a particularly unstable patch of wet earth while on a walk with my family. I’ll never forget the sensation of the ground giving way beneath me, and sinking, faster than I thought should be possible, pulling me down towards a sodden mass that I knew would drown me without mercy. Do you know how it feels to realize the earth is alive and hungry, for _you?_ To feel its shifting mass pushing in around you like a tremendous maw that wants you like a beast wants flesh? In that moment, I recognized that, in a strange way, I was wanted exactly as I was, in the unthinking way that sustenance is wanted. Not wanted for care, but wanted because consuming it is what you were born to do. There is no other choice, no other option. The inevitability of my fate staring up at me out of the brown-black mud beneath my feet hungered for me desperately, and I was petrified. It was a terror I had never known, and one I have never matched since. I was pulled out almost immediately by my parents, and although I spent the next week refusing to go anywhere near any earth that was not solidly covered with concrete, the sensation remained. I didn’t see many sinkholes after that, and none of the ones I ever came across were like the one in the park.

This one was entrancing. It did not call to me, not in the way that people say things call to them. It did not sing or entice me, it was just hungry. Deep in the pit of my stomach I was too, but I did not know what to do about it, so I would just sit and watch it. Watching pieces of earth occasionally fall from the lip of the hole into the nothingness beneath, watching the ground open slowly, like a gentle yawn. Every day after work I would come to see the sinkhole, and every day it wanted me exactly the same. How would it feel to step inside, I wondered? To cave like the sodden earth, pulling itself ever inward, to let myself be sucked in with a force I could scarcely imagine, to allow gravity to drag me deeper, deeper than I would survive. Gravity is an unyielding thing above ground, but the truth is that it doesn't stop once you pass that barrier. Even beneath the earth I knew I would continue to sink until everything I was was crushed out of me. The earth hungered for that sacrifice, and something about it called me deeply, straight to my very bones. I started to dream about the sinkhole swallowing me up, swallowing up my home, my city, the whole of London. All the world I knew, falling and crumbling to pieces beneath the maw of the earth to soothe its ravenous hunger. Nothing ever satisfied it, and nothing ever satisfied me. I would awaken disoriented, half slick with terror, and half gasping with a hunger so raw and fierce that it made me vomit the first few times I felt it. No amount of food could ever satisfy the depth of raw desire those dreams awoke in me, no amount of anything could. It was something more I craved, something I wouldn't get from what sustained humanity. No, I needed something else, something beneath the earth. Still, I resisted. I had a life, after all. I had a job and friends and a family that at least cared if I lived or died. I couldn't give myself over yet. Leaving it was difficult, and staying away was harder, but I pulled myself away again and again.

It was a month after that I got assigned to a project at work I had any real concerns about.

All of the statements we record are supposedly paranormal - although there’s very few that actually freak me out - so dealing with them ethically gets a little tricky already, but when I got one that was supposedly about a minor, I really didn’t feel comfortable just signing it off for anyone to go poking around at. I’d dealt with some more delicate data collecting situations before back at uni, so I knew that in situations like these there was supposed to be a set of protocols the Institute as a whole would follow to protect the statement giver’s identity and privacy and whatever else was ethically necessary. With kids especially, you have to be careful to make sure you’ve got consent from their caretakers before you start asking them questions, and even if we had that, I was a little worried about re-traumatizing the kid. So, I figured it’d be a good idea to go and have a look at the Institute’s paperwork. When I asked, the research department head didn’t seem to have an idea where that might be, which I found incredibly odd, but I assumed it had just been misfiled or something, so I just thanked her for looking and went to ask her boss next.

I don’t think I had spoken to Elias Bouchard before, I mean, aside from when I first applied. I had seen him since then, obviously; it isn’t a massive organization and he comes to check in on us every now and then, or dress code someone, or generally handle bureaucratic stuff, but it wasn’t like I had any need to actually go have a conversation with him. I didn’t really pay much attention to him at all, honestly. Aside from his being my boss and all, he wasn’t my immediate manager and he didn’t exactly seem like an interesting person, so most of the time I didn’t have any reason to see much of him. He wasn’t hard to find, though, so I just took the lift to his office and asked if I could speak with him about a procedure and that was that. It was quite simple in theory, right up until the moment I walked through his door.

I remember when I took that first step in, the room felt strange, like something had shifted in the air as I stepped over the threshold, and I was suddenly very aware of everything about myself as if I had just entered a place of the most intense scrutiny. Even so, it wasn’t until the moment he noticed me that I realized I had made a mistake I couldn’t take back. Bouchard didn’t do anything of note, not really, he just looked at me, although that gesture alone had a weight to it I could scarcely name. It was like… like he was looking with more than just his two eyes. Like he was staring with many more than that, straight through my skull into everything inside of my head. Like something about the way he looked at me was intended to pull apart everything I had to say before I could say it, like he was rummaging through the contents of my brain and I was helpless to do anything about it. I’ve always feared being… seen, to put it simply. The idea of someone looking at everything I was, knowing all the things about me I wasn’t ready to share yet terrified me deeper than I knew how to explain. I used to cry when I was asked questions I didn’t want to share the answers to, and it was far, far worse when someone was given information about me that I hadn’t personally explained at all. I grew up with that happening, with prying eyes demanding what could possibly be wrong with me that I had made such a foolhardy mistake, scathing tongues pulling apart the layers of my skin trying to figure out why I thought I was who I said I was. When I first found the word for the attraction I felt and was met with a thousand hateful questions of _why_. When I freed myself from a toxic relationship and every bystander put the blame on me. When I was outed by my own sister, and every eye in my home turned upon me with threat. Each time it happened, I was overcome with the nearly physical need to run and hide, to pull the darkness around me and wipe away every memory of myself from those who wanted me bleeding for everything I had done, by choice or otherwise. I remember each awful moment with a vicious clarity, and yet they all paled when compared to the way I was suddenly sure this man knew me, and the way this man was going to use that to hurt me. I wanted to scream. I wanted to claw off my skin just so he would stop noticing it was there, I wanted to destroy everything I was just so he couldn’t see that it existed, and more than anything I wanted to cut those seeing eyes straight from his head. I know my mouth went dry, but I still think I stammered out my question, because I vaguely remember his answer. He sounded bored, despite the way his eyes never left me for a moment, and his words went in and out of my ears like fog, but I think he told me to do whatever I thought was best, to check in with my colleagues if I had any other concerns, and that he was sure I’d figure it out. Later I'd realize it was completely unhelpful advice for what I needed to know, but I really couldn’t bring myself to care in the moment. All I knew was I felt more watched than I had my entire life, and the longer I was in there, the more interested he seemed to become. I don’t remember what I did after that; if I thanked him or excused myself or if I simply turned and ran, but the last thing I remember was those eyes that saw deeper than my face, and an expression that was… almost hungry. Like he was considering if I would make a good meal.

The walls started to have eyes after that. _Everything_ started to have eyes.

It wasn’t obvious at first. It started with little things, like the feeling of being looked at lingering for just a moment after one of my colleagues moved away. The sensation that someone was standing over my shoulder behind my desk when there was no one around. A lone bystander at the train staring at me for a bit longer than should have been appropriate. A small layer of dread lining the pits of my stomach that I was able to brush off as nerves or lack of sleep. That was the other thing; I stopped sleeping well. Whatever it was that was causing me to feel watched, it followed me home, right into my bed. I began waking several times throughout the night, convinced that someone was standing at the foot of my bed, watching me sleep. Every time when I awoke, there was nothing. Nothing but that sinking pit in my gut as I brushed off yet another incident with paranoia. But it wasn’t paranoia. Something in me knew that. It wasn’t lack of sleep, and it wasn’t nerves. It started getting worse.

I don’t know why I didn’t quit right away. Some part of me was so frightened to lose what little stability I had, so much so that the fear of being on my own, searching for opportunities again was somehow worse than this constant, agonizing scrutiny. And then, as time went on, I lost faith that quitting would do anything to stop it. The eyes were everywhere after some time, just as awful outside of work as they were within it, and I knew that without my job, the only thing that would change is that I would have to find a position somewhere else while still in this all-consuming state of fear, this gut wrenching paranoia. No reasonable person would ever hire me like this, I was sure. If I survived long enough to even start looking for another one, that was. The sensation of being watched never ceased, never faltered, never lightened up. It took about a month before it became unbearable. The feeling of someone standing over my shoulder never faltered, even when I turned around. When I stepped onto the tube, every single face on board turned to stare at me in unison, even those who were facing completely the other way. They blinked in unison, watching and watching as I curled around myself and did everything I could not to cry. The paintings in my home moved, the eyes of coworkers followed me when it made no sense for them to be paying attention to me. Every single person who lived and breathed around me started staring at me constantly, waiting for me to step wrong, waiting for me to make a mistake. Waiting to devour me. I stopped talking to Julie and Nick. I think they texted me once or twice about wondering if I was angry with them, but I couldn’t handle responding. I couldn’t handle their seeing me more than absolutely necessary. They were just as dangerous as all of the others now, and despite what affections I had once had for them, it couldn’t hope to measure up against the constant horror that plagued my every living moment.

The only thing that could console me was that sinkhole in the park. I had tried to turn to anger to save me at first, tried to listen to the pounding heat in my veins and throw everything I could into fighting what I couldn’t see. I did my best to hurt those who watched me so intently so they would stop; I tried to swing for their faces, tried to kick away their legs, tried to force away their eyes, tore the paintings in my home to bits, but in the end it all just felt suffocating. No matter how much I lashed out, it never saved me, and it kept melting back to hunger in my gut, so I turned to the sinkhole as my hope instead. I started sitting beside it all hours of the day I could, scarcely eating, only sleeping when exhaustion took me over and I collapsed beside it. Something about it was a reassurance; its promise of darkness, its promise of itself, wanting nothing but the fact of me, rather than the truth of me. It was the only thing that wasn’t looking at me anymore. The feeling of being watched subsided to almost nothingness as I drew closer, hands gripped around the edges of it, staring in as deep as I could see at the mass of shifting earth and blackness deep beneath the surface. Each time, I felt a relentless, terrible thrumming in my gut. Like a stomachache, or something more primal. An unquenchable hunger deeper than the earth that longed to crawl beneath the foundation of my home and wait. A call that I felt in every bone in my body that begged for rest, begged for something I could be certain of, begged for the solidity of ground and the infinity of earth and the weight of the crushing world that would finally justify my crushing soul. It whispered of nothing but the eternity of itself; solid and sure, close and safe, forever and ever. I longed for that, with every head that turned my way, with every eye that gazed upon me, I longed for the cold call of the unforgiving earth that wanted nothing but me, raw and unchanged. It did not want my secrets or my fear. It didn’t want to know me at all. It didn’t want the soul of me, just the fact of me. It just wanted to consume me, in a great and terrible and jealous way, and I ached for it with a longing I had never known. The hunger became my lullaby, its rumbling movements my cradle, its heavy weight on my chest my blanket. I was so very hungry for what I did not understand, and as much as I held back, I became so very tired of fighting it.

I started to consider what it was calling me to claim, to become. The earth hummed with an attainable potential; one that would not break me or run me ragged to achieve, and it pained me more each day to not be one with it. It was the worst when it rained. So many things drowning, so many sinking beneath the mud, coming home to what called them. Such an all-encompassing experience I could scarcely do anything else but listen, listen to that wailing hunger in my soul, listen to that ubiquitous consumption, listen and ache. Dirt started caking my hands, leaves tangled in my hair, my clothes turned ragged. Something about it began asking me to consider my history, where I came from, everyone I once knew. A past full of sleepless nights and unanswered prayers for rest and voices, voices, voices, begging me to be silent, begging me to listen, never to speak. So many of them tried to mold me into the image they wanted of me, I realized, but the earth would fit to my form exactly as I am. So many of those I once knew had filled me with their words; tying my worth, my future, my soul to them. I started longing to fill their lungs with soil and watch them try to choke out the words now. Would that satiate the hunger that consumed my every waking thought, I wondered? The earth had shown me such peace, perhaps it could show them as well. Why had I ever wanted anything other than this buried truth, I wondered? Why had I cared so much about pleasing the world when something that wanted me already had sat right beneath my feet? I couldn’t remember. I still can’t.

My work suffered tremendously. It was nearly impossible to complete my daily tasks with any sort of academic comprehension when it felt like everything I intended to write about saw straight through my intentions, and all of my coworkers were doing nothing but watching me, waiting for me to burst like a bubble and spill all of my secrets and insides and history for them to see, for them to feast on. The sleep deprivation, lack of proper self care, and constant terror were also starting to seriously impact my health, and I know I looked like hell most days when I came into work. A couple of them tried to ask me about it, check if I was okay and such, but I recoiled from their questions with enough force to keep them from asking again, and so I was left alone, for the most part. Alone except for the thousands of constantly watching stares that I felt all around me. It was too much. I had been watched for months now without a single day of rest, and even attempting to go about my daily tasks was agony. I longed for the comforting pressure I felt by the sinkhole, the promise of safety when covered by the earth, buried away from what could see me, and I reached for the nearest thing I could find that I could cover myself with. I was in filing at the time, so I had thousands of research papers near my desk. Statements, follow ups, methods and analyses, reviews of literature, protocols and transcripts and more and more. I pulled them all from the shelves, one by one and some all at once, taking each from their carefully documented places and spilling them over every inch of myself I could reach until I was laid completely on the floor, covered in manifests of the very Eyes that were looking at me. And then I started screaming.

I’m not sure who found me first. Julie? Nick? The department head? It doesn’t matter. All I know is that I heard someone say “we can’t let this go on” in a voice I recognized like an echo of an old friend, and then hands were around my arms and I was being pulled from my meager safety and I was screaming so much my throat was raw from choked sobs. I begged them to put me back, begged them to let me rest, begged them to look away and to stop seeing me when I had been so close to the smallest solace of safety. I was angry, yes, but more than anything I was terrified. The air felt heavier then, as if it knew that things were about to change. The others came to a decision. If I had been my younger self - before I had known what it meant to be turned inside out by a ceaseless sight, before I had known the call of the earth, before I had become more paranoia than person - I might have understood what they did next. After all, it had been nearly a month of my coming into work looking like death each day and staring over my shoulder every five seconds for apparently no reason, making everyone jumpy, turning in truly terrible work and being almost cruel to anyone who asked any questions; it was perfectly reasonable of them to try and get me fired, but inevitably it was the wrong choice.

I barely remember the journey up to Bouchard’s office. I know they held onto me as we walked, I remember Julie’s voice telling me I needed help, I remember that thick feeling of something waiting, a predator about to be realized. Did I resist? I must have. I must have known what would await me. That every step took me closer to the thing that had started my suffering, the creature that didn’t have enough eyes to explain the way he saw through me, that rotted monster that paraded itself like a man. I must have been afraid. Perhaps I was too exhausted then to fight what I knew I was going to have to face, or perhaps, even then, I understood that whatever happened next was going to be necessary to my emergence. My true steps into safety.

I tried so hard not to look. I tried so hard as they opened the door, as they called out with voices of concern and disapproval; I squeezed my eyes shut and I pressed my hands over my ears and I was not going to see, I was not going to see. And then- and then he asked me to look at him, and for all of my horror, all of my hatred, I just couldn’t help it. I looked. Immediately I was filled once again with that awful dread of being seen so utterly, to know that he intended to use everything I was to destroy everything I could be, to wipe away anything I had left of my secrets and replace it with that all consuming fear. Where that curious hunger had been in his eyes before, it was now nothing short of ravenous, the kind of look a wild animal gives to a bleeding out deer, the satisfaction of knowing a meal is nearly realized, and it was only then that everything became clear. This thing that called itself a man was going to kill me. He intended to crack open my skull and pull out all the contents of my head and my soul and I was intended to die at the hands of his voyeur. It was in that moment of white hot, pure revelation terror I decided that I was not going to let it have me. I belonged to the earth, the all consuming and choking earth that wanted endlessly and promised me rest and safety in its eternal embrace, and I did _not_ belong to the Beholding. And so, faster than I knew what I was doing, I attacked the creature that thought it had defeated me.

He had been surprised when I clawed for his eyes, dirt-caked fingernails intending to tear through soft tissue and blind the manifestation of the all-seeing Eye that had taken everything from me. Stupid fool, to think he could devour me without consequences. I had had enough of running and never standing to fight. I had enough of being small enough to swallow without consequence, of being small enough to fit under a fist, of being used and devoured and spending all my time recovering. You can’t crush that which thrives in the small spaces. You can’t squish that which strikes up through your shoe. I was done with running. I’m pretty sure Bouchard broke his nose trying to get away from my sudden fury, as I ripped through his left eye and hung on and watched his face go blank with pain. It was _wonderful_ , seeing my tormentor hurt was _heady_ , and when I remembered all the suffocating force of my sinkhole and got my hands around his throat, I fully intended to kill him. If it hadn’t been for the others I would have done it too. Foolish, brave Julia. Stupid, optimistic Nick. The pair of them pulled me back, tore me away from my revenge, from my prey. They begged me to stop, they wanted to save him, they would rather me die than let a monster be defeated, and they were still Looking at me with eyes that shone in that same way his did, alight with hunger for a knowledge only I could provide, alight with the thirst to see me crumble. I stopped caring who I hurt then. They were all the same, I realized, all creatures overtaken by this evil place, all monsters of watching and seeing and _I wanted them to let me go._

I’m not certain how the Buried saved me, how it came to meet me, but I know I was calling for it. I begged for the deep embrace of the sinkhole that I longed to throw myself into, the pressure of having no space to move, no space to be seen, the familiarity of the only thing that had brought me comfort in my exposure against the voyeur. I begged for the clawing earth to protect me from the eternity of the Eyes that I knew now intended to claim everything that I was, intended to see every piece of my history and present that I had tried to deeply to keep safe, to keep mine, and to twist it and lash back out at me with it. I called to it with everything I had, and the earth lent me strength, lent me the weight of itself and the eternity of itself and I welcomed it with _worship_. Someone’s eyes were crushed in my hand. Someone’s blood was dripping down my arm, someone’s leg was twisted all the wrong ways, no one was breathing. I was so sick of hearing their breathing, seeing their eyes move about me, knowing their thoughts and words dwelled only on what sustenance watching me would gain, so I stopped it. I stopped all of it. And it was _gratifying_ all the way down to my soul. They are both at the bottom of the sinkhole now, gifts to the safety of the Buried.

I think Bouchard survived, but it almost doesn’t matter now. I walked _free_. _I get to rest_. The Center Of All Things is my home now, my guardian, and the eyes have succumbed to the power of the Buried that now surrounds me wherever I go. I have found that which promises rest at last, the kind that embraces me from all sides, never letting me come up for air, and promises nothing more than the eternity of itself. The weight of its safety is crushing, and only when I drown in it do I feel like I’m breathing. Not that I have any need for such things anymore. There is _freedom_ in the Buried, not freedom like you would understand it. Not the freedom of choice, but the freedom of a hunger satiated at last, of a life reborn as it should be; clawed back up coughing from the dirt from whence we first came. A proper resurrection, with a purpose I am _pleased_ to fulfill.

So do what you will with my words, with my pain, with my story, but know that the Eye cannot touch me anymore. Archive my story, follow up on my honesty, mourn for those I've killed, take notes and file me away forever, it doesn’t matter to me. You cannot touch me anymore. I am free, and I am _safe_ , and I no longer need to run, and I will do any awful thing the world asks of me to keep it that way. I will never go hungry again, no matter the cost. I will no longer run, and I relish in the embrace I have been gifted. Your Eyes will not see me again, and I am made whole by that which encloses me from all sides, and teaches me once again to breathe, and I wholly, and utterly love it, and all it calls me to become. All it calls me to do. You can think me a monster if you want, but know this. I have what it takes to survive my story. Can you say the same, Archivist?

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: the author has never been sucked into a sinkhole before and refuses to Google anything, so I doubt that ended up being entirely realistic fldksfjkd. I have been sucked into some very unstable mud around a lake before, so that's what I mostly based that bit on!
> 
> I'm considering doing a podfic for this, so that will potentially be coming soon. Definitely let me know if you'd be interested in that! In the meantime, thank you so very much for reading, please leave a kudos and/or comment if you enjoyed it, and stay safe wherever you are!! <3


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